Beyond Blade Runners and Replicants, there must be a place “Over the Rainbow” for us to exist in solidarity and equanimity. And certainly, the 21st Century hovering above us should be a cause for hope, not despair; yet even with this new century being no way near its quartermark, it’s already given us a planet wheezing from ecological crisis-to-crisis, where an untenable economic system of neo-feudalism ravages plants and animals, as well as the rights of those we love (or should love). In the Terror & Twilight of Our Broken Age, what ideology best speaks and acts from a place made from compassion and love? Instead of passively looking at the new century that hangs in the sky, blinking obliquely above us, we should instead reorganize our motions to The North Star of Human Decency, namely that of Anarchy. For this 21st episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse will finally come out of the “political closet” and show some raw & real skin: they are both Anarchists Without Adjectives, and they believe that this ideology of love is the only practical solution to the world’s byzantine disorders, fraught with confusion, warbling on without a just antidote. In their most personal and revealing podcast since the show’s first episode, Jesse & Matt explore their disparate journeys to humanity’s greatest romance, Anarchy; they will describe its origin story, its turbulent relationship with authoritarian communists and how this political philosophy is not only the most idealist of ideologies, but also why it’s the only one which can ride inside us--whispering out “hope” for a utopian future.

What Is Anarcho-Primitivism? A Working Primer (However, if you want a popular conception of the idea, you can watch this popular piece of “ManArchy.” If you want the documentary version, you can watch this instead. Or--fuck all--if you just want a visual sight-gag of Anarcho-Primitivism, you can watch this ode to pre-millennium dread.)

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Description of “The Wall” in in the opening paragraph of The Dispossessed:

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

Noted Correction: Matthew incorrectly stated that members of Congress receive lifetime pension after only being in office one term (two years); In actuality, members of congress receive pension after five years (but Senators do get pensions after just one term of six years). For more information on this, go to FactCheck.org’s article on the subject.

Margaret Atwood’s Interview on Canada’s Q TV Where She Discusses Her Creation of God’s Gardeners in The Year of the Flood (2009) & How Environmental Activists Must Make Friends with the Religious for a Truly Big Tent Movement to Save the Planet; Also Talks About the Split Between Christian Fundamentalists & Environmental Christians Who View Humans as Stewards of the Earth.

The Making of “America’s Most Radical City” as Explored with the Founding of Cooperation Jackson; Jackson’s History of This Struggle Is Also Explored in Ajamu Nangwaya & Kali Akuno’s Book Jackson Rising (2017)

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt discuss the slow, spiral reckoning of Ridley Scott’s much-celebrated and increasingly influential film Blade Runner, whose long and winding road lead to a sequel, Blade Runner 2049. While detractors of the original film might feel they’re viewing a sexy-time noir featuring little more than robots and porn-jazz, for the entranced, the film’s hypnotic imagery and ruminations on universal themes like humanness, memory and belonging still keep many cineaste-hearts aflutter. After the blockbuster ascendency the Star Wars franchise and SF’s increasing maturation as a cinematic genre, Ridley Scott’s formerly “one-off” was released in 1982, and quickly disappeared at the box office and inside film critics’ confused typewriters. However, unbeknownst to many, this leftover lasagna turned into the cult film of cult films. Blade Runner would later grow an organic fanbase from Arty Nerds, Noir Addicts and Cyberpunks, all of whom would despoil their underoos over spinners, unicorn origami and whether Deckard was or wasn’t a replicant. Seeing blinking cash-registers in their eyes, Hollywood producers sought out Denis Villeneuve as their architect to extend the franchise with Blade Runner 2049. Your meta-guidance-counselors, Matt & Jesse, will provide a spoiler-bonanza of both films, weigh out Villeneuve’s sense of cinema, and examine how the sequel’s repeater bleakness short-circuits better questions and ideas. The co-hosts will finally imagine how this film might be retrofitted or retold, narratively speaking, and roust its viewers into utopian dream-scaping.

Forbes Magazine (Japanese Edition): On Why Blade Runner 2049 Failed for Its Opening Weekend in the Box Office. {For those that can’t read Japanese, I will summarize what Tomoko (my badass wife!) translated for me--while we were both laughing at the article’s assessment: the film failed due to it 1) being aimed at middle aged men in their forties; 2) it wasn’t appealing to women, and henceforth, not of interest to dating couples or married folks; 3) and lastly dads couldn’t take their kids to the movie because of its “R” rating}

Vice on YouTube: “Inside the Making of Blade Runner 2049” {Interviewer to Ryan Gosling: “Do you feel optimistic about the future of mankind?” Gosling pauses, gurgles, snorts, and then they both laugh . . .

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt explore the paranoid dread and narcotic pull of Adam Curtis’ most recent documentary of political-noir, HyperNormalisation. In 2 hours and 40 minutes, it charts the globe-hopping travails of terrorists, bankers, politicians and America’s digital aristocracy--all of whom use humanity as pawns by promising simple stories to explain complex problems which can’t be solved with “perception management” and pastel fairy-tales about “good vs. evil.” Considered by many to be the most talented and remarkable documentarian in Britain, Adam Curtis has weaved suspicion and suspense into a BBC career that stretches from 40 Minutes: Bombay Motel in 1987 (which explores the have and have-nots of the city) to his most recent film HyperNormalisation in 2016 (which explores how an entirely Russian condition has now passed into the wider-world). Curtis’ documentary was released less than a month prior to the mind-gagging upset of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, and the film increasingly speaks to a disenchanted, rat-fucked future of no-returns. Jesse & Matt will discuss what makes this “dank” film so compelling and deeply-felt, as well as what makes it, almost equally so, such an evasive work of art.

The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new de-centered global network of the third stage of capital itself. This is a figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature -- one is tempted to characterize it as "high-tech paranoia" -- in which the circuits and networks of some putative global computer hookup are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind. Yet conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt -- through the figuration of advanced technology -- to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be theorized.

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion with Matt Bruenig--a lawyer, blogger, political analyst and Twitter-dynamo who’s got your back when you’re kettled by Roaming Hillbots and Randian Regressives. More importantly though, Matt has just started the first grassroots, people-powered think tank called The People’s Policy Project (3P). Funded by small donations from $5 to $15 dollars, 3P is an attempt to actually make Think Tanks “think” again, but for the purpose of actually benefitting the 80% Americans who now own only 20% of the nation’s wealth, and are increasingly living lives of quiet desperation. We will discuss Bruenig’s childhood, his educational experiences and awareness-path toward political change, his history as a blogger for the think tank Demos, and his surprising success at crowd-funding 3P via Patreon. We will also talk about where Matt plans to take this new and enterprising venture in the years ahead.

Do Boys and Girls Like Trucks and Buses or Barbies and Conversation? Or Both? Simon Baron-Cohen in The Guardian: “They Just Can’t Help It.” Here Is an Excerpt:"How early are such sex differences in empathy evident? Certainly, by 12 months , girls make more eye contact than boys. But a new study carried out in my lab at Cambridge University shows that at birth, girls look longer at a face, and boys look longer at a suspended mechanical mobile. Furthermore, the Cambridge team found that how much eye contact children make is in part determined by a biological factor: prenatal testosterone. This has been demonstrated by measuring this hormone in amniotic fluid."

Peter Guber in Psychology Today: “The Inside Story” Excerpt: “Telling stories is not just the oldest form of entertainment, it's the highest form of consciousness. The need for narrative is embedded deep in our brains. Increasingly, success in the information age demands that we harness the hidden power of stories.”

Adam Curtis’ Blog Post About the Origins of the First Think Tank in Britain: “The Curse of Tina” An Excerpt from His Survey About The International Policy Network:

“Think Tanks surround politics today and are the very things that are supposed to generate new ideas. But if you go back and look at how they rose up - at who invented them and why - you discover they are not quite what they seem. That in reality they may have nothing to do with genuinely developing new ideas, but have become a branch of the PR industry whose aim is to do the very opposite - to endlessly prop up and reinforce today's accepted political wisdom.

So successful have they been in this task that many Think Tanks have actually become serious obstacles to really thinking about new and inspiring visions of how to change society for the better.”

“Unlike most think tanks, which are financed by large corporations and foundations, 3P is funded by small donors pledging $5 to $15 per month on the Patreon platform. This unique funding source enables us to publish policy insights untainted by the compromises typically demanded by monied interests. We are, as the name suggests, the People’s Policy Project, not Walmart’s Policy Project and not the Gates Foundation’s Policy Project.

The work of 3P aims to fill the holes left by the current think tank landscape with a special focus on socialist and social democratic economic ideas.”

What would democracy look like if it first existed at the workplace rather than in the woesome consignment of America’s party-politics, which renders our dreams for The Golden Square into Squalid Shit-mash? For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion about this paradise where workers actually experience freedom, equity and solidarity with two folks who’ve jump-started one of the first media co-ops in Southern California: Dan Nowman Niswander, co-creator of The Nowman Show and Dr. George Kallas, a political analyst and Political Science Professor at Miramar College in San Diego. We’ll learn about their chance-encounter and their epiphany to do the mind-meld by creating Arete Media Productions. Principally though, they will discuss why we mislabel democracy in Da Yankeelands, define what co-ops are, and also explain what makes worker-owned co-ops so very visionary in our Age of Workplace Tyranny & DollarDoom.

Dan Niswander’s Clever Lyrical Reference to Pink Floyd’s Song “Brain Damage”: “The lunatic is in the hall./ The lunatics are in my hall./ The paper holds their folded faces to the floor/ And every day the paper boy brings more.”

On this episode, Matt & Jesse have a discussion with Kelsey Goldberg (@KelseyFGold) and Jack Suria Linares (@SuriaLinares213) from DSA-Los Angeles chapter about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Kelsey and Jack explore their childhood and later political awakening by describing the moment (or moments) that led to not only their transcendent belief in socialism, but how they went beyond mere beliefs by deciding to take action and become activists and organizers via their self-discovery process. We will also learn about DSA’s history and contributions, as well as its future aims as a consequence of its recent National Convention. Additionally, our visitors to the show will talk about what DSA-LA has in the revolutionary pot that’s about to boil over into a Mario-Brothers pasta of comrade-goodness. By the very end of this podcast episode, Kelsey, Jesse and Jack get our ‘DSA-Curious’ Comrade, Matthew, to break down his resistance and finally #TrySocialism.

Chris Hedges in Truthdig: “Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of ‘brainwashing.’”

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion with Frantz Pierre--a community activist and organizer who’s leading a revolutionary project to educate Los Angeles residents about the benefits of Universal Basic Income via a local, first-of-its-kind, pilot program. But how might Frantz Pierre and other fellow comrades create this program on a citywide scale when the mythology and romance of the “work ethic” and the sin of “laziness” are so indoctrinated in our communities and belief systems? How will we demand “wages” if such an enslaved chunk of our lives--going to jobs we hate--has been entirely automated, and work for the 99% no longer exists? And if and when the argument is truly won, where will the money come from? This podcast will aim to answer those questions. It will also detail why this utopian notion should be viewed as the “New Common Sense” in our global age of shafted, precarious employment, and why UBI is an essential spring-step toward human liberation.

Here is Within Reason’s YouTube Interview with LA Mayoral Candidate, Frantz Pierre: Part 1 & Part 2. (In the Race for LA’s Mayor: 24 People Registered; 11 Made the Ballot with Pierre Coming in Eighth Place in Vote Tally.)

Strange Currencies: The LA Chapter of The League of Women Voters Didn’t Hold a Debate in 2017; And Corporate-Owned Media (Like the “Esteemed” LA Times) Didn’t Bother to Make Visible the Opposition--Relegating Only a Minor Discussion of the Two Top Candidates, but No One Else: Duly Cited Here.

The New York Times: “Guaranteed Income for All? Switzerland’s Voters Say No Thanks”(In Article: “About 77 percent of voters rejected a plan to give a basic monthly income of 2,500 Swiss francs, or about $2,560, to each adult, and 625 francs for each child under 18, regardless of employment status, to fight poverty and social inequality and guarantee a ‘dignified’ life to everyone.”)

From The Website’s Concept Description: “Twenty Americans from all walks of life have just won a lottery: a guaranteed check every week that's big enough to cover basic living expenses. What will they do with this opportunity?”

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse explore the most exceptional work of utopian thinking since the days of Occupy Wall Street: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015). This is the co-hosts third such “CliffPod,” and they will hum over some of the most far-reaching and visionary aspects of this book, weighing out the co-authors’ success in diagnosing why the left has been--to use Jesse’s apt phrase--“drowning in failures” amid the continued carnage of Neoliberalism’s rotisserie blades. Matt & Jesse will also evaluate the insights the authors gain from how the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were able to masterfully deploy “second hand dealers” and create a winning strategy for the right that the left has yet to match in any transformative way (and which go beyond the Cult of Direct Action and Paper Anarchy). Finally, our Abbot & Costello co-hosts will assess these authors’ policy demands and solutions in order to learn why this book about a post-work world is so vital to read for our deserved Star Trek future.

Marx's oft-cited comment in The German Ideology that in a communist society (or some version of a post-capitalist society) he would be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic" has become more famous than what he said in other places, more specifically.

"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Matthew Snyder’s allusion to “some weird kind of Mars landing where you have to do mine-work in some bad 1980’s Science Fiction film” is actually Peter Hyman’s Outland (1981)--the setting of which takes place on Jupiter where Sean Connery must find his inner High Noon as exploited workers mysteriously and ceaselessly continue to die.

“It was the first rebellion in the American colonies in which discontented frontiersmen took part. A similar uprising in Maryland took place later that year. The alliance between indentured servants and Africans (most enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class, who responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.”

And to Close Out This Week’s Shownotes About a Post-Work World, I’ll End With a Revolutionary Fop Who Proudly Wore Flowers as Lapels . . . Oscar Wilde. As He So Movingly Put It, So Many Years Ago, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

"A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine."

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss their fraught and less than ambivalent feelings about their first time at Southern California’s Politicon, and provide a discerning look at how it represents the shallow conceptions of what politics so often involve, and how it could have been reimagined as a democratic space for transformational insights and real debates. The majority of the podcast will discuss solutions to create a utopian future (or at least one that guarantees The Golden Square) by combining the co-hosts’ deflowered experience at Politicon with Episode 12’s arm-wrestling over how to get to this future they keep pressing for. Jesse & Matt will do this by offering up The Slingshot Seven: a policy platform of ideas for anti-authoritarians and activists to demand and work toward, and in doing so, build real power inside the Meth-house of America’s 21st Century.

“You’re asking a good question, and I can’t give you a definitive answer. Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matthew & Jesse go beyond Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next and his apt citations of policy successes in other societies found outside the U.S., and will instead grapple with the stasis of the Left and its tragic inability to wrest change from the Death-Dealers of Neoliberalism. How can we learn from both the past and present to make another world possible? How can we transcend the suffering and carnage found in our daily lives that are as deceptively petty as buying child-socks at Target, but are, nonetheless, consumer rituals made heavy by unseen violence? Join our co-hosts as they do a politically drunk version of Jiu-Jitsu via the wreckage of what lies behind, around and ahead of us. Jesse & Matt will then imagine what strategies and tactics are most deserving of our attention in the here-and-now, so we can transcend The Poison Pyramid and finally arrive at The Golden Square.

Beyond just talking about rabbits shitting outside their cages, in this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt will provide a sustained analysis on Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next. Not only was this the finest documentary released in 2015, but the film is Michael Moore’s magnum opus without parallel or peer in his storied and fecund oeuvre. After shooting and releasing a misshapen and badly organized documentary Capitalism: A Love Story in 2009, it seemed that the director had lost his vision or was in some sleepy and lonesome lull. But it’s important to remember that the same lull in vision during his early career with Canadian Bacon (1995) and The Big One (1997) also appeared right before his breakout films, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. By going invisible for six years after the release Capitalism: A Love Story, shooting in ‘secret locations’ unknown to anyone, Michael Moore came back fully revitalized and more sophisticated in his rhetoric and tactics of persuasion, by rejecting partisanship and labels in order to reveal why other countries just simply do it better when it comes to solving daunting societal problems, such as work-stress, malnutrition, K-12 educational failures, student debt, work-life balance, drug addiction, prisons, as well as the loss of women’s rights and demanding government reforms. Jesse & Matt hope to tell you why Where to Invade Next is so vital to revving up America’s rudderless drift. They will also describe why the film’s uses of framing and persuasion are worth stealing--especially given the left’s tragic history at winning anything of lasting consequence amidst the Drum & Death March of Neoliberalism.

“A survey of inmates who were released in 2005 put Norway’s two-­year recidivism rate at 20 percent, the lowest in Scandinavia, which was widely praised in the Norwegian and international press. For comparison, a 2014 recidivism report from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that an estimated 68 percent of prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years.”

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt finally shoot off some long-stored Roman Candles, letting their fireworks rain down on an area of community life they’ve spent an inordinate amount of time living inside of: the looking glass of education. As the fourth node of The Golden Square, education is the capstone of these most basic and essential human rights. It’s hard to imagine any human future that’s vital or dynamic without education’s essential place in the foundation of society. The co-hosts will both celebrate this cornerstone of the Golden Square as well lament its capture and brutalization from Neoliberalism's Extermination Matrix. In the last section of the discussion, Matt & Jesse will blast-out their final volleys of Roman Candles by outlining a utopian future and framework for education that all of humanity so richly deserves. And in this slice of imagineering, our guides will assert that education is a right that should be extended from the cradle to the grave.

Mentioned In This Episode:

Stephen Jay Gould: “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”As quoted in New Scientist, March 8, 1979, p. 777

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss the third most important element of The Golden Square which is so simple and obvious, that it’s remarkable this idea is even contested as a human right in the Yankee-lands of Ol’ Red, White and Blue: the absolute right to healthcare for every human being on Earth. Matthew will provide a surprising prologue about what’s suddenly taken place in his personal life since this episode’s initial recording and open up about his mother’s life-long illness; in call & response fashion, Jesse will then talk about what it was like to get healthcare in Sarah-Palin-Land as a child. The co-hosts will also explore their personal relationships to this essential cornerstone to The Golden Square, and their own anxieties about having access to healthcare as middle-aged men with pre-existing conditions. And lastly, Matt & Jesse will look at healthcare systems around the world, and offer up a poignant portrait of the very near and immediate struggles facing activists as they fight for a momentous Single Payer bill in California (SB-562).

Gentrification. Housing Bubbles. Developers & Their “Pay 2 Play” Campaign Donations (Bribes) to City Council Members. And then there’s the needless cruelty of permanent homelessness. On this episode, Jesse & Matt ratchet-up their manifesto on their Mixtape for the Future by talking about the second-most important cornerstone of The Golden Square: namely, the universal right to human shelter. While a good deal of the debate and conversation will provide a clear-sighted and information-packed survey on the problems, causes and solutions involved with creating universal rights to housing, Matt & Jesse will also expand past common notions of shelter that often go unnoticed in the popular conversations found in daily rituals. And in doing so, the co-hosts hope to transcend the blind and abject observations from America’s TV-Clown punditry on housing.

“This is one of the bluest cities in one of the bluest states in the country. This place is run by Democrats and has been since forever. This has nothing to do with Republicans or Trump. We’ve got high-rise luxury condos sprouting up all over Downtown that no one actually lives in. Massive gleaming skyscrapers sitting there empty while more and more people are forced out of doors. This is a disaster. I’ve been to developing countries that have less people living on the streets than the second-largest city in the wealthiest country in the world.

So here’s a proposal: how about not another goddamn viral clip, or tweet or magazine cover or open letter or vacuous emission of another goddamn celebrity or late-night comedian or entertainment industry luminary talking about Trump or Russia or “backwards ignorant America that votes against its own self-interest” or cracking jokes about the racist, sexist rubes that live out in the sticks until this shit is fixed? Do you seriously think this shit is not racist and sexist? How about not getting to be in the 1%, or even the 10%, to drive past literal tent-encampments on your way to work, to step over the dispossessed just moments before they turn on your spotlight and soundcheck your mic, and have a goddamn thing you have to say about politics and society get listened to? How about not getting to publicly opine about national, much less geo-politics until you can figure out how your own city council works and you drag your camera crews to right outside your studio doors and show the world what’s going on in America in 2017, in one of the "strongholds" of "the resistance"? How about that?”

For this week’s episode, Matt & Jesse transition away from talking about which man-made myths must be stripped out from the the mixtape for the future (“The Poison Pyramid”) or what should just be ignored while they haplessly spiral in the drain (“The Circle”). Instead, our co-hosts will introduce a new idea-shape “The Golden Square,” which is comprised of the four most essential tracks in our shared mixtape for the future. All too often, the notion of rights in nation-states don’t acknowledge the fundamental requirements of a just society, but our Golden Square is composed of four tracks that are essential for our shared future. The first fundamental and most immediate cornerstone of this square, and one we would be hard-pressed to ignore is the universal right to food.

In the sixth episode of The Future Is a Mixtape, Jesse & Matt break out of their self-imposed duo-igloo and bring forth two friends far more adept at exploring the miraculous and shocking rise of Jeremy Corbyn in British politics: 1) Alex Biancardi, a dual British-American citizen who is an instructor of Political Science; and 2) Joshua Bregman, a “former American ex-pat” who was a film student in Britain during both the heady turbulence of the college-tuition protests and David Cameron’s vicious austerity measures. Before Corbyn’s rise, Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour had been melting in membership and participation after “Bush’s Poodle” went into retirement; and, in turn, the Labour Party’s center-left mildew of “capitalism with a happy face” had repeatedly failed to inspire a broad cross-section of a detached public, who spit-out in anger and voted for Brexit anyways. It was also a nation that was increasingly fragmented by class, race, religion and civic apathy. So who is Jeremy Corbyn and how did he reverse the Zombie-stasis of UK politics? What series of odd accidents and openings lead him into a position of power and acclaim, which now threatens the 40-year reign of Thatcherism and TINA (There Is No Alternative) -- the two seedbeds of which sprouted forth from an undying belief that markets will solve everything? So what is the DUP and why is Theresa May still clinging onto her Prime Minister position when the Tories lack the outright majority to implement their Voldemort manifesto? And how might Labour cross the MP-threshold to become the majority party, creating a space for another, more successful election that pushes Corbyn into May’s residence at #10 Downing Street? From listening to our first guests, Alex and Josh, we hope you’ll learn why UK’s Snap election has created the most exciting opening for socialism The West-left has seen in several decades.

In this fifth episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse discuss Peter Frase’s diaphanous, compact and idea-drenched work of “Social Science Fiction,” which revs up & rides out to the sweet page-count of 150 pages, and contains far more ideas than most books three-times its size (ahem, The Circle). Frase’s nonfiction book, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, argues that there are actually four possible futures for humanity. The book accomplishes this task, ingeniously so, by threading together science fiction novels as well as marxist and futurist theories to see what aspects will appear in these futures, and how they might overlap or build off one another. The author doesn’t simply re-shuffle the easy card-deck of the Star Trek versus The Matrix techno-binary--that Yanis Varoufakis and other activist-thinkers often cite as the only two techno-futures available. Instead, Peter Frase offers up four possible futures: Communism, Rentism, Socialism and Exterminism. And by coordinating these “ideal types” upon the axis points of equity vs hierarchy and abundance vs scarcity, the author illuminates what these four futures are likely to give us.

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss the mucky-malarkey of Dave Eggers’ 2013 “satire” (?) of Silicon Valley: The Circle. While this podcast will focus on Eggers’ conscious intentions and unconscious outcomes of his novel, some discussion will also be meted out on The Circle’s even more miserable film-adaptation of the same name, featuring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and John Boyega. Matthew will also explore the movie’s unsettling “Fear of a Black Cock,” and what that says about the film’s lack of awareness. Lastly, the co-hosts will illustrate why this science fictional novel is an easy signifier for contemporary art’s failure to imagine possible utopias.

On this episode, Jesse makes the case that the third point of “The Poison Pyramid,” which should be readily designated for the dumpster, is the worship of the Celebrity. Matthew makes the case that this is just a shiny, distracting feather to something that rides upon a much larger, deeper and more worrisome creature.

“Lots of evidence pushes back against this ageism. One study found that twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. A 2011 study found that physicists make their greatest discoveries around age 48. If you saw the movie The Founder —which, apparently, nobody did—you might note that Ray Kroc was in his 50s when he got McDonald’s going.”

“Let Fran Lebowitz Sooth All Your Election-Related Worries” - Vanity Fair: He’s a poor person’s idea of a rich person. They see him. They think, ‘If I were rich, I’d have a fabulous tie like that. Why are my ties not made of 400 acres of polyester?’ All that stuff he shows you in his house—the gold faucets—if you won the lottery, that’s what you’d buy.”

“The ancient Greek gods actually had a lot in common with our modern-day Hollywood celebrities. Both sets of characters are seemingly perfect, ageless, beautiful, powerful uberbeings who jet about having affairs, making enemies and getting into loads of trouble. The Greek gods lived on the peaks of Mt. Olympus, and Hollywood celebrities live, well, on the bluffs of Beverly Hills. The exploits of Greek gods were told in epic poems, and the exploits of Hollywood celebrities are retold in tabloids and glamour mags. The similarities are spooky. And in both cases, the central stories are just so lurid and tacky.

Long before the media became obsessed with legendary womanizers like Errol Flynn, the annals of Greek mythology were detailing the sex romps of the all-powerful Zeus, who had more than 150 documented affairs, not quite as good as Wilt Chamberlain but still impressive. The bottom line is that both Greek gods and Hollywood celebrities offer us a mythology, a common set of allegories. And even though we may worship these divine beings and as much as we may covet their superhuman qualities, I think we're deeply comforted by their foibles. We love the fact that they're so screwed up. It gets us off the hook because it sets the bar so low. If Zeus or even Tom Cruise can't hold down a stable relationship, well, it makes it easier for the little guy who may have similar issues.”

“Let’s break this into groups. People over the age of 50 watch the most TV, somewhere in the range of 50 hours a week, according to Nielsen. In fact, people over the age of 50 are watching more TV per week this year than last. But that’s where that trend ends. People 24 and under are watching, roughly, two fewer hours of live TV and DVR programming per week than last year. And 25- to 34-year-olds (roughly speaking, millennials)? They’re watching an hour less per week, down from 27 and a half hours to 26 and a half hours. People between 35 and 49 mostly 36 and a half hours from nearly 37 hours a week.”

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

This week, Matt & Jesse discuss the second point on “The Poison Pyramid” -- namely the horror-show of Capitalism, and why it’s an awful idea that we should refuse to carry with us into our much-deserved future.